Are all Climate crisis deniers conspiracy theorists?

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Quantum Quack, Sep 25, 2019.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The current best supported theory is that the earth is in a natural cooling stretch or mode of the "cycle", which is being overridden by an unprecedented boost in atmospheric CO2 and associated "greenhouse" gases.
    - - - - -
    You can't change reality by naming it wrong.

    An argument ad hominem is an invalid form of argument against the message, not the messenger. It is an attempt to argue against the message by irrelevantly impugning the messenger, personally - and that is granting you the deflection "messenger", when we are actually dealing with paid liars and propaganda.

    What you and your American political faction have been labeling "ad hominem" is instead a variety of other things. Most aren't arguments at all, against anything, but instead simply denigrations and insults or labels you find insulting (such as, comically enough, "Republican") - public derision of the person, regardless of the thesis.

    Some - not many - are at least arguments, but they are arguments against the person rather than their argument or assertion - against taking the person as a source of facts, assessments, or even simple accuracy of assertion. These are not ad hominem arguments, because their impugning etc is directly relevant to the argument against the person they make.

    To repeat two examples:
    1)That would be the case in the automatic dismissal of all sources of AGW denial that are funded by Exxon and/or involve "scientists" who have no expertise in the field. Note: not their arguments or assertions. Those are not involved. So that is not an ad hominem argument.
    (We know that Exxon did fund some genuine research, verified for themselves that AGW was real and overwhelmingly significant, and secretly used those findings to guide their own business plans while simultaneously promoting public denial of AGW by bribed "scientists" of proven cupidity and no relevant expertise. ) ; or, thread relevant, the professional fixers hired by the Republican administration and its financial backers to deceive the public about the Mueller report (Barr, pre-eminently).
    2) That would be the case in accurately identifying Barr as a professional fixer hired to deceive the gullible and conceal perfidy. That is not an ad hominem argument or part of one, but a legitimate ground for dismissing Barr and whatever he says (not anything in particular) from any honest discussion about the Mueller report or anything else. He could even be making true and relevant assertions or arguments (in theory), and still should be dismissed from any honest discussion on those grounds - the naming of his role is part of an argument against the "messenger", not the "message". And so it is not an ad hominem argument.
    - - - -
    But not useful and significant responses to AGW, attempts to slow it down and ameliorate its effects, to restore in part the ability of organisms (including people) to adjust as they have adjusted in the past to the much slower and smaller natural cycles. Those are suppressed by greed, hypocrisy, and organized propaganda campaigns of lies and deceptions designed to support that greed and hypocrisy by creating bafflement and misplaced anger in US political discourse.
     
    Last edited: Oct 22, 2019
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  3. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    Yes..absolutely...In retrospect..I really did not mean to take away attention from the major culprits...I have been looking at the performance of various countries reaching targets ...mmm USA has the worst rating...what is very surprising ..is the number of countries doing something, setting targets and reaching them.
    Even China is trying whereas USA don't seem to care.
    Alex
     
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  5. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    Wow, iceaura starts to explain his understanding of "ad hominem", reacting to my
    with
    Fine. This is what I had in mind, writing that text. And if I would have had in mind that each attack against the messenger is ad hominem, I would be indeed wrong. But this is an effect of out of context citation. I was discussing QQ's
    So, QQ's point was obviously that the argument, as an argument against "the message she delivered", is irrelevant. I agreed with this irrelevance explicitly:
    In fact, digging the context would not have been even necessary, given that even the quoted text "directed against the messenger" makes it obvious that there in the context there is a message which is relevant.
    Let's note also the complete failure to understand the context, which can be seen from the continuation:
    The messenger, in this context, is Greta. Fine, either you have named Greta a paid liar making propaganda (I will not comment on this) or you have completely failed to understand the text. So, "learn to read" is what has to be said here.

    But let's look at how iceaura defines what means "ad hominem":
    This looks like a personal definition of ad hominem, artificially restricted in comparison to the usual mainstream use. With such a trick, one can easily name those who apply "ad hominem" in the usual way as being wrong.

    Let's see: "That is not an ad hominem argument or part of one, but a legitimate ground for dismissing Barr and whatever he says (not anything in particular) from any honest discussion about the Mueller report or anything else" essentially presupposes that it is sufficient to show that the argument is legitimate to prove that it is not ad hominem.
    But Wiki (which can be seen as presenting a sort of mainstream opinion about this) explicitly mentions that this has been criticized:

    "Canadian academic and author Doug Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[13] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words."

    I share this position, as you can easily see from my statements about it. I always describe it as being only a weak argument.

    The following restriction makes even less sense:
    I name an argument ad hominem if it is directed against a person, and if the argument is used in a context where some argument or assertion of the attacked person is considered, and it is obvious from the context that the aim of this argument is to weaken that argument or assertion.

    So, if you automatically dismiss everything from Exxon, this is your personal decision, and your personal justification for this is not ad hominem. But if you are confronted in a discussion with a particular study funded by Exxon, and answer that you generally dismiss everything from Exxon, possibly even supporting this by your own justification for this decision, it is ad hominem.

    Last but not least, note that I consider both parties, Reps as well as Dems, as a bunch of evil war criminals, with only minor differences between them. Of course, once you defend mainly Dem criminals at least as less evil, without defending in a similar way the Rep criminals, in a discussion with you I will tend to attack the Dem criminals. And, given that there is no disagreement between us about the criminal character of the Rep criminals, the disagreement is at most about which of the two gangs is eviler. So, your attempts to label me a Rep propagandist or so are clearly insulting, and you know this very well.
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2019
    LaurieAG and Xelasnave.1947 like this.
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  7. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    I lost your site please remind me I wish to visit if it's still up.
    Alex
     
  8. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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  9. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No, it doesn't. It's straight from the dictionary and the usage manual.
    It's not what you posted - nearly opposite, and on the central point.
    Not even close.
    You don't, and it wouldn't matter if you did - as has been repeatedly emphasized throughout, that "position" (illiterate misunderstanding of the term "ad hominem") is very common - it marks a large number of people.
    No, you don't. You name insults that are not arguments "ad hominem", when it is obvious they have nothing to do with any particular argument or assertion of the insulted person.
    Nonsense. You have the direction of argument backwards, as usual - not only self deceived via that vague and turbid language (the wingnut syntax collapse begins) but completely wrong about the "presupposition" involved. It has nothing to do with the legitimacy of any argument, but with the legitimacy of the role claimed by the targeted person.
    Of course. You say that often. And as yet another display of your ignorance of American politics, especially your childish dependence on US corporate rightwing marketing pros and the Party line they sell you, that has been referred to many times by me - usually as your vulnerability to the Republican supporting "bothsides" line of US corporate mass media, and your parroting of same.
    This from the guy who denied "balancing" propaganda to extract information. Remember when you claimed that you did not "balance" like that?

    Yep, that's what you do. You do not, of course, bother to reality check what you are balancing, all that Republican bubbleworld bs. You have swallowed whole the Republican media feed bs of "both sides", and your entire framing of US politics has been built on that shibboleth of Republican Party line propaganda.
    You cannot see that the Republican Party is more evil than the Democratic Party, that it has more evil people in it, and that it does more evil, because you have assumed otherwise and cannot check your assumptions against factual reality. Likewise, you are unable to differentiate simple observation of fact from propaganda assertions and "defense" of one Party or the other, one set of criminals or the other, because there is no such reality of fact in your worldview - so you never know what I am posting about, and cannot follow arguments based in that reality.

    Interestingly enough, this means there are some things you cannot see at all - simply because they are unavoidably one-sided and Republican. You cannot see the Iraq War, its roots in American fascism rather than "liberal" or "globalist" ideology, and all its corporate capitalist domination and corruption and side effects, for example. And so you - and the American political faction you have cast your lot with - cannot see fascism coming. You see even a guy like Trump as a businessman and "nationalist"

    Which brings us to, interestingly enough, the fact that you cannot see AGW or any other scientifically grounded, fact based, issue. These are inherently one-sided matters - reality has a liberal bias, to use a long-coined truism, and that kind of reality is invisible to you. It is also invisible to the large majority of Republican voters - the faction you have joined, in the US. And therein lies tragedy.
     
  11. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Nope. Solar output is down very slightly since the mid 1970's. So we are in a (slight) cooling phase - or would be without AGW forcing.

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  12. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    Some one-liners without argument, which could be as well replaced by a simple "no" without loss of information, will be disposed of.
    Sorry, but "a legitimate ground for dismissing Barr and whatever he says" has nothing to do with any role he claims. It is a justification for your personal choice to dismiss whatever he says. I have to use presuppositions about what you mean, given that your text taken alone does not clarify this.

    In itself, these are two parts, connected with a "but". And what follows the "but" is somehow supposed to show that the part before it is correct. I see two interpretations of why this could be so. One would be
    This is IMHO the straightforward interpretation, given the use of "legitimate" (which, in the other interpretation, would be irrelevant), and anyway at least a hypothesis that has to be discussed. The other would be the one you have repeated here:
    Fine that you have clarified this. That you are unable to clarify the meaning of your text without attacking your opponent is, of course, quite uncivilized, but, ok, you are part of the modern American culture, where this has to be expected.

    The objection makes no sense from a logical point of view. An ad hominem argument has, of course, the intention to invalidate some particular claim. It does this by attacking the person who has made it. This is all one needs to classify it as ad hominem. If there is a connection in the argument itself is irrelevant. If the ad hominem argument is valid as an argument ("he has lied many times about such things before") or not ("he is a very dirty old man") is not relevant, it cannot be, if a clearly fallacious ad hominem is an ad hominem too.

    If there is an argument that is attacked becomes clear from the context where it is applied. You can identify if there is such an argument in the context if you think about another counterattack: Instead of "this is ad hominem" one could also claim "this is off-topic". If there is a reasonable answer to this, of type, "no, this is on-topic, X has used that argument made by Barr here", then an attack against Barr, however primitive and unrelated to the particular argument used by X is ad hominem, because it is used to discredit the argument used by X. A primitive attack against Barr, without any relation to what has been discussed in the context, would be clearly off-topic.

    So, if a personal attack is on-topic, there will be a context with some relation to Barr. There may be cases where this context does not make it ad hominem (say, your use here as an example in the context of a discussion of the meaning of "ad hominem"), so one has to take a look at this context too, but in roughly 94.51% this context contains some claim made by the attacked person and the attack against the person has the aim to create doubt that this claim is correct.
    Of course. We are here in a completely different context - I participate in a discussion with you, correcting you when I think you are wrong, and doing nothing if I think you are right. This is something completely different from extracting information from various propaganda sources. (Of course, I have to do this too, given that your texts are obviously propaganda. But the process of extracting informaton from your propaganda does not include any balancing. If you refer to a scientific paper, I look at the paper, and the result depends on the evaluation of what I read there. If it is ad hominem or a primitive attack, as usual, it goes into the dustbin without any balancing.)

    The remaining "you are stupid" bs disposed of. Except maybe this illustrates a possible error (intentional distortion remains much more plausible, so that this is only a possibility) in your thinking:
    As explained, I do not write anything where I agree with you. With rare exceptions, I will not write "here you are correct" posts. If I think the Iraq war had roots as in American fascism, as in liberal globalist ideology, and you see roots in American fascism only, there will be no discussion from my side about American fascism, given that there is no disagreement. The discussion will be about liberal globalist ideology as being another root. This is the place where we disagree. Does it follow that I do not see American fascism as one of the roots too? Of course, not.
     
  13. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    8,502
    One positive of the arguments etc is that many people (on both sides) are looking at the situation and no doubt some are considering the history of the Earth and the various changes that have occurred..the Sahara desert not always being desert for example.

    A second good point is the development of electric cars, solar panels, better batteries and wind generators.

    Alex
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Yep. Among literate people, who are not in the faction that misuses the term, anyway.
    Which is how the rest of us recognize that your use of the term - like the usage of the rest of the Republican parrots you emulate - is wrong.
    It's the dictionary definition. What you regard as "mainstream use" is Republican propaganda usage, as I noted above.
    As noted many times, you parrot the entire corporate authoritarian schtick right down to the specific vocabulary.
    And you do not write "here you are incorrect" in response to other posters of US corporate authoritarian propaganda. You parrot them, instead.
    Not to you. You always get the context wrong, in US politics.
    Silly boy. It's directly relevant - a central fact of Barr's career and role in Trump's administration.
    And you are once again putting quote marks around things I did not post. That's a habit you need to break, if you wish to avoid reinforcing your reputation for such posting.
    And there is. When the topic is Barr's continuing career as a professional liar and cover-up media rep, most recently in his role in Trump's administration, observing that his career is one of professional lying and covering up is related to Barr. That is the context in which informed people evaluate Barr's speech noises and rhetorical tactics. You, on the other hand, "extract information" from them - thereby getting played for the sucker you are.
    Is that difficult for you to understand?
    You specifically deny the role of American fascism whenever it comes up - such as in Trump's foreign policy, or McConnell's handling of climate change initiatives.
    Why you do that is another matter.
    What appears to be the case is that you are unable to identify American fascism, and so you are left to blame some ever-shifting and unidentifiable "deep state" for everything you cannot blame on "liberal globalists".

    And all of this is of course repetitive and uninteresting, except for the central fact that you are parroting propaganda from a dominatingly influential source - the American fascist movement that has taken over the Republican Party.

    Most of the other posters of that swill here have taken to dissembling and hinting and so forth - posting one line innuendos, avoiding direct repetition of what even they have come to recognize as a stench, not a pomade https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-tribe-that-rubs-shit-in-their-hair.html. They want to slag on the "liberals" (the alternative is admitting to a lifetime of horrible error), but they don't want to sign on with the likes of Barr or Sessions or McConnell - they can see the end of that skid. You, on the other hand, don't know any better. No hiding behind Tulsi Gabbard for you, when Trump sends the military to secure Syria's oil after promising "withdrawal" and "they are coming home". No pretense of saving American lives, when the Turkish strongman threatens to pull the plug on Trump's Istanbul real estate royalties. You do still carry around a certain amount of Clinton obsession, but none of you guys can get that completely off your shoes.
     
    Last edited: Oct 27, 2019
  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    Do you feel that the bitterness helps to make your points? Just curious.
     
  16. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    As to the title question - No. Many of them are simply desperate rearguard conservatives, who have somehow invested their identity in the unsupportable western/industrial/capitalist status quo: denial is their last stand, which they will die defending.
     
  17. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    and unfortunately take an awful lot of people with them...
     
  18. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    To the domed stadiums you mean... (see, this is a troll)

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  19. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    Iceaura starts with "no I'm right" claims about the ad hominem definition without presenting evidence.
    If I do not answer a posting, I simply do nothing.

    Quoting a text containing only the phrase "a legitimate ground for dismissing Barr and whatever he says" (and nothing else) in quotation marks, iceaura objects
    But "a legitimate ground for dismissing Barr and whatever he says" is a quote copypasted from iceaura's posting #81, even with the emphasis preserved. So, iceaura has now been proven to lie even about what he wrote himself, and not about something written in a different context years ago, but this week in the same thread, on the same page, so that using CTRL-F for finding this phrase would have been sufficient to find it. So, iceaura does not even recognize his own texts.
    Not at all. I have not questioned that the ad hominem you used against Barr was justified, a valid argument as strong as possible for an ad hominem argument.
    If I do not write anything about it, I do not deny it. A person found lying about his own posts this week on the same page claims I have denied something without presenting any quote with a link.

    What follows are the usual boring propaganda fantasies about me parroting Rep propaganda.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    As described:
    You also misuse the term "ad hominem", btw.
    It's a field mark of the American wingnut - like the head feathers on a cockatoo.
    Illiterately wrong again.
    I never post ad hominem arguments.
    Not one, ever, on this forum.
    I attacked Barr personally, as the hired scum that he is, and argued against accepting him as a source of information on the grounds that he is and has always been a paid liar and cover-up guy for upper-echelon Republican bedshitters.

    That is not an ad hominem argument - as you yourself posted:
    "An ad hominem argument has, of course, the intention to invalidate some particular claim."

    Because you have suckered for agitprop from a tactically illiterate source, you are unable to adhere to that definition, or even keep it in mind from one post to the next.
    And your misuse of the term is - again - characteristic of your political faction on this forum. (Your fellow wingnuts even expand to "ad hominems", which is comical).
    No text of mine contains only that phrase.

    To restore some foundation:
    That second is exactly what I posted regarding Barr.
    Straight from the dictionary - no ad hominem argument involved.

    So: the only question remaining is what happened to the ability of the wingnut right in the US to think - to read definitions, to recognize the meanings of words, to consider issues and events in a frame of fact and common reality. We know how the North Koreans brainwashed American pilots - the repetition of nonsense involved, etc - and we know that the American fascists deliberately adopted and adapted and improved those methods for their own political purposes, but that was coerced.

    This clown circus is voluntary.
     
  21. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    You quite clearly refused our invitation to the dome.
    It won't be issued again: you can stay in your own self-sufficient, tornado-proof house.
     
  22. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    It's been deliberately and systematically culled and/or bred out over the last 60 years.
     
  23. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    I see that I have forgotten to identify the positive thing in this posting. Defending the own ad hominem against Barr, by pointing out that it is not an off-topic personal attack but justified by the context, we read
    So, it is obvious that the attack against Barr was directed against what I have made in the discussion, namely extracting information from a Barr quote.

    But, as one can expect, iceaura continues to deny this:
    In this case, iceaura himself has identified some particular claim. The claim I extracted from Barr. My "a personal attack is either off-topic or ad hominem" strategy has worked. To defend the attack against Barr against the off-topic accusation, iceaura was forced to clarify that the personal attack against Barr had an aim, and that this aim was to make some point in that particular discussion. The aim was always obvious, namely to criticize my use of what Barr has said, which is, BTW, quite typical for ad hominem arguments.

    Let's summarize this discussion: There is a major difference between my definition and iceaura's. For me, it is ad hominem, if a personal attack, say, Barr is used in a discussion, and the context of the discussion shows that the aim was to question a particular use of a quote from Barr. That means it is sufficient that the context allows the identification of a particular claim which has been attacked. As a consequence, a personal attack in a discussion is, if not off-topic, with high plausibility ad hominem. If one uses iceaura's definition, all one has to do is not to mention the claim one is attacking in the text of the attack (even if it is obvious from the context which claim is attacked). That means one can avoid, by a purely formal trick, transform a classical ad hominem argument into a purely personal attack.

    For reasonable people such a purely formal trick will not play any role, once the context allows identifying the claim which is attacked, the attack itself is clearly ad hominem.

    Nonetheless, despite this nonsensical character, iceaura has developed here for himself a quite comfortable strategy. One can post ad hominems all the time, all one has to do is not to mention the argument one answers in the own text itself (one can even quote the argument, it does not matter, because it is not part of the own argument), and if one criticizes the use of ad hominem, one can attack him as being part of a group which is bad (rightwing, Rep, fascist or so) and uneducated (does not "know" iceaura's private definition of ad hominem, which excludes the case where the attacked claim is not mentioned in the argument itself but follows from the context). Here the actual example:
    With a reasonable definition of "ad hominem", this covers quite a lot, namely almost all personal attacks (except those that can be rejected as off-topic, or which are simply separated, as they would be, say, in a separate thread titled "Why one cannot trust Barr"), and independent of their legitimacy (given that there are legitimate ad hominem arguments and that at least some ad hominem arguments are fallacious). In comparison with such a wide definition, iceaura's strategy is simply an artificial restriction of "ad hominem" to avoid to be attacked for using ad hominem arguments all the time.

    An interesting point is that the denial of an argument being ad hominem makes the situation even worse: The alternative is that it is a simple personal attack, moreover, unmotivated (the motivation has to be hidden, else it would be the claim which is attacked, making the argument ad hominem). Unmotivated personal attacks are something worse, warnings and later bans would be appropriate reactions.

    But this is no problem for iceaura. If he is accused of making unmotivated personal attacks, he can defend himself by showing the (quite obvious) motive for the attack, thus, proving that it is, in reality, an ad hominem argument (but, of course, without naming it this way). If attacked for ad hominem arguments, he defends himself as described above. Given that this defense is combined with an own counterattack - the opponent is part of those despicable right-wing nuts who don't know the meaning of ad hominem - nobody will recognize that iceaura has classified his own argument in a much worse way, as an unmotivated personal attack.
    Intentionally to provoke you, and based on the conclusion about the discussion about this that you were unable to show that this was incorrect.
    First, don't omit relevant parts (the emphasized part) in a way that distorts the meaning. Then, learn to read - "quoting" means you have quoted a text of somebody else, in this case, my text. The quote in question contains the following:
     

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